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The campaign to re-elect Donald Trump president has gone all-in on a remarkable strategy: they're going to double down on the stupid. Call it the greatest attempt at gaslighting ever, we suppose. The idea is to just pretend the coronavirus pandemic doesn't exist and continue to ignore any evidence to the contrary. And they actually expect this to be a big winner for them with the voters.
Once again, I am throwing in the towel and there will be no new column today. I have no excuse for doing so, I am flat-out just taking a vacation day.
There is a silver lining in all of this for my readers, though, because I will not be taking any big summer trip this year, so there will be no week-long break in the schedule this year (as usually happens). With both Netroots Nation and the Democratic National Convention happening remotely, my summer trip plans are obviously just not going to take place at all. So while I may indeed take a few more lazy summer days off in the coming weeks, at least there won't be a big interruption in columns later this summer.
I will at least try to answer some of your recent comments later on tonight, when I start doing the nuts-and-bolts work of putting together tomorrow's Friday Talking Points column. I have also done all the data-mining and spreadsheeting necessary to start up the Electoral Math column series again next week, so you've got that to look forward to as well.
So please forgive me, but I just had to take a personal day off to smell the roses. To get some fresh comment threads going, here's a topic for everyone: "Is John Roberts truly now the crucial 'swing vote' on the Supreme Court, and what does that mean going forward?" Or maybe: "How will the New York state prosecution of Trump end, now that they're going to get to see his taxes? What has he been hiding so strenuously?" Discuss among yourselves.
-- Chris Weigant
Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant
You can call it many things. Shooting one's self in the foot. Being hoist on your own petard. A European might call it an "own goal." But whatever metaphor you choose, it seems Donald Trump is actively sabotaging his own chances of re-election. Trump, in classic Trumpian style, has chosen to make a political statement about an issue that really has nothing to do with politics at all. And it's beginning to work among his most fervent followers. The only problem for Trump is that this means it is also working against his chances of re-election.
Even though both Donald Trump and Mike Pence have been casting their ballots by mail for the past few elections, Trump decided it would be a dandy idea to demonize voting by mail. But due to the overwhelming likelihood that this November's elections are going to be radically different in nature than previous elections due to the coronavirus pandemic, this means that the Republican Party is being hamstrung in its efforts to get its voters to safely vote by mail. Trump may not just be killing his own chances of being re-elected, but he may also bring a whole bunch of other Republicans down with him as well.
A generational change is now sweeping America. All of a sudden -- even in the Deep South -- it is no longer politically acceptable -- even for Republicans -- to defend the Confederacy. Mississippi has now become the last state to remove the Confederate battle flag from their own state flag. The Republican Senate voted to force the Pentagon to remove Confederate generals' names from their bases. Even more astonishing, perhaps, was the news that NASCAR has banned the Confederate battle flag from being displayed at their events. But what's most astonishing about all this is that there seem to be few defenders of the Confederate flag left in the political sphere (on the national level, at least). Other than President Donald Trump, that is.
The Trump campaign is setting itself up for a rather large tactical failure. Whether the campaign fails overall in November is a bigger question, of course, but they seem to already be failing in one crucial aspect of any successful presidential campaign, and that is to define your opponent early. This worked wonders for Barack Obama versus Mitt Romney, and it also did the trick for George W. Bush against John Kerry. Throughout the spring and summer, the incumbent president successfully defined their challenger in a very negative way with the public.
So far, Trump's efforts to do so against Joe Biden have been notable for their lack of success. First Trump tried to slap the "Sleepy Joe" nickname on him, but this led to unexpectedly positive backlash, since so much of the public is downright exhausted by Trump's ceaseless firehose of antics, tweets, and playground fights. "Sleepy" started to look very good indeed to the voters, by comparison.
So Trump moved on to a rather laughable caricature of Biden, which is chock full of what the psychologists term "projection." According to Team Trump, Joe Biden is a doddering old fool who, as they love to put it, "can't string two sentences together" in a rational way. The problem with this Biden caricature is there is so much obvious evidence to the contrary. More on that in a moment, though.
Happy Almost Independence Day! (Or whatever we are supposed to call "the federal holiday before the actual holiday's date.")
Because it is a holiday, though, there will be no usual Friday Talking Points column, sorry. I really should have warned everyone about this last week, but somehow didn't notice the calendar. As someone recently put it, "everyday is Tuesday now...." Time seems to blend into itself as we all adapt to the new pandemic reality.
Instead, please enjoy the following column, which ran on the Fourth of July, 2008. Just to remind everyone, at that particular point in time Barack Obama had secured the Democratic presidential nomination, but the general election was still months away.
Looking back on it now should remind everyone of how inane and downright stupid the political arguments of the day were. Back then, the huge, enormous, world-shaking debate was about politicians wearing flag pins. Seriously, that's all we had to argue about in those days of yore.
In the best of times, Americans like to call our president by a rather grandiose title: "the leader of the free world." This is a holdover from the 1940s post-war era as well as the dichotomy of the Cold War era which followed it. Back then, we were indeed leading the free world -- in direct opposition to the Soviet Union's leadership of the communist world. Since America had not been directly devastated by the ravages of World War II, our economy bounced right back and we were able to get Europe and Japan back on their feet again with generous policies such as the Marshall Plan. From the 1950s through (arguably) the end of the century, American manufacturing dominated most industries. So our political leader was not just the de jure leader of the United States but, by extension, the de facto leader of the free world as well. But Donald Trump has now left this reputation in tatters. The only superlative left to call ourselves is now "the world's best bad example."
The more time goes on, the more evidence stacks up that Donald Trump is simply incapable of performing the basic duties of a United States president. What is the president's job, boiled down? To process incoming problems and information, make policy decisions, and then implement those decisions. Trump fails spectacularly on all three legs of this stool on a regular basis. But this week has been really notable, due to Trump's utter failure to defend the Constitution of the United States (and the country at large, of course) against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
Every so often I like to tempt fate by writing an article which could easily (and monumentally) be proven wrong within mere hours. Today is one of those days, because I feel pretty confident in predicting that Colorado and Utah will essentially show the rest of the country how a mail-in election should be done. I seriously doubt we'll see scenes of frustrated voters not being able to cast their ballots in a timely way, because with universal mail-in voting, that's not really a problem. No long lines, no machines that don't work right, no poll workers who don't know how to operate the machines, no voter-suppression efforts (both overt and covert) at all. And while Colorado is at the end of a long journey from being a purple state to a very blue one, Utah is still about as staunchly Republican as it gets -- proving that mail-in voting is not a partisan issue at all. Or it shouldn't be, at the very least.
With President Donald Trump at the reins, Americans are always facing new and ever-more-frightening questions about how his administration works (as opposed to the way the federal government is supposed to work, of course). With the new reports of the Russians paying the Taliban bounties to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan, we are all now faced with another such question. Was the president briefed about this situation and then refused to do anything about it, was the president not briefed about a situation involving Russia paying for American soldiers' deaths, or was the president briefed on paper -- but just never read it? None of those answers is very comforting, for different (but equally frightening) reasons.
The New York Times, who broke the story, says Trump was indeed briefed. So far, both Trump and his intelligence services are saying he was not personally briefed. But there's a strong likelihood somewhere in between that may turn out to be what really happened: Trump was provided the information in his "Presidential Daily Brief," but just never read it. This is quite likely because of something which would have been scandalous in the extreme for any other president but which, under Trump, has sadly become normalized -- Trump just refuses to "do his homework," on just about anything.
